Race-Based Preferences Are Corrosive Public Policy

In Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious affirmative action program, she stated the majority’s naïve expectation that 25 years later, such programs would be unnecessary. Texas’s race-conscious program, which the U.S. Supreme Court has just agreed to review, shows that this prediction was naïve. With more than a third of that time elapsed, we are further than ever from that goal. Indeed, if the court upholds the Texas plan, we will know for certain that we will never reach it.

For the court to uphold the University of Texas system would compound the felony.

The reason for my grim conclusion is simple: Texas, which knows a thing or two about goal posts, is continually moving them back — and political pressure from minority activists will never cease. It is not enough that the state’s Top Ten Percent Plan, which was purposefully adopted in 1997 as a race-neutral way to increase minority enrollments in the University of Texas system, increased the minority numbers substantially — to 21.4 percent in 2004. Shortly after Grutter was decided, U.T. went still further, taking race into account explicitly in deciding about the roughly 20 percent of the student body not already admitted under the Top Ten Percent Plan. By the class entering in 2010, this race-based policy produced 23.1 percent Hispanics, 5.1 percent blacks and 17.3 percent Asians. When other categories are included, it is America’s first majority-minority student body. Since Asians are now “over-represented” in the state’s race-obsessed thinking, Texas is pitting everyone against them in a zero-sum game. This is hardly conducive to good race relations.

Yet even this was not enough racial preference for the U.T. system. It now demands racial balancing not only at the campus level, but also in each classroom, which presumably can only be accomplished through racial balancing at the level of programs, majors and courses.